Harnessing the Web for small businesses since 1998

How We Work

Our Focus

We focus on small business, typically with 20 or fewer employees. If your business is large enough to hire an advertising agency or public relations firm, you’re likely to get your Web marketing from them as well. Our focus is on firms that don’t have such help.

Pricing

A recent blog post talking about what you should pay for search optimization services alone said that a bare-bones effort would cost at least $750 per month, and if more services are needed, then the price goes up from there.

Our prices are deliberately set lower than even that “bare bones” price. We don’t have a nice office with a receptionist sitting in front to greet you. We’re just the owner, Dave Roberts, and a number of freelance part-timers who carry out various specialized tasks. There’s very low overhead; and note that Dave already has an income, so isn’t trying to make a living from Web marketing.

Our Web Marketing Service

If you’re interested in working with us, we discuss your business and your marketing needs and goals, and how those can be met through the Web. Then we give a price that’s a fixed price monthly retainer, generally significantly less than the $750 “rock bottom” price mentioned above.

That fixed price is given to encourage you to make full use of all that we offer. You can have search engine optimization through on-site changes. We will conduct a link exchange campaign for you if that’s appropriate. We will manage a pay-per-click campaign for you if we decide together that’s worthwhile. We’ll help you get your newsletter going. We’ll get you started promoting your business on social networks. And all of this happens for that fixed monthly fee. A typical price is $500.

If you use our Web marketing service, we’ll also host your site at no additional cost, using Dave’s Superior Hosting, which is also available separately.

Dave’s Superior Hosting

Dave’s Superior Hosting is priced below the extra-cost hosting options from the major hosting companies, but it’s very much better.

Your site is hosted on a high-performance server, that provides your visitors a better experience than they will get from the major hosting providers. Fifteen years of experience teaches us that the biggest companies do the best advertising but not the best job of hosting. Performance and availability are the most important features of excellent hosting, with support a close third. We choose an excellent hosting company, typically one that is focused on what they deliver to customers rather than advertising and promotion. If the company ceases to provide good service, your site will be moved to another provider, without any disruption in your service.

Second, a number of important features are included. Every week, your site is scanned, and if there are any changes, a new XML site map is generated and Google, Bing and Yahoo are notified, so that they can spider your new content quickly. Every month, your site is submitted to all English-language search engines for indexing. Backups are made daily at the hosting facility. In addition, if your site is constructed with WordPress, we install a custom backup facility that backs up your site a separate time to an encrypted cloud store that is off-site, for the ultimate in protection. Finally, if you have a newsletter facility that can use your site’s SMTP server, you can avoid the cost of a separate delivery facility by using the high-speed SMTP service that’s available for your site.

Contract

No contract is required. Each month, we invoice at the start of the month for that month’s work. Any time you are not satisfied, just don’t pay for the coming month. If we’re hosting your site you can convert to Dave’s Superior Hosting Service and we’ll keep hosting your site.

Although there’s no contract, it’s not possible for us to work on an intermittent basis. The efforts that we undertake typically take several months to show results (except for pay-per-click campaigns, that show results quickly), so interrupting our work after a month or two is not a good way for you to get satisfactory results.